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Better Twitter Analytics for Nonprofits

The importance of measuring the effects of your
organization’s social media outreach is not in question. But what
metrics should you track? What analytics tools do you need? And what
can you do with those numbers, once you’ve got them?

The whole point of social media measurement, after all, is to enable you to assess whether you're meeting your goals for social media, and to make your social media strategy more effective. I see this as basically a three-step process:

Data Collection

Analysis and Interpretation

Action

More and more nonprofits are getting onto Twitter as it's now clearly entered the mainstream, so let's take that platform as our example.

Monitoring and Analytics Tools for Twitter

Twitter.com itself
(and of course the desktop clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck) will
give you current data on basic measurements: Your account’s followers;
how many people you’re following; how many tweets you’ve published in
total; how many Twitter Lists you’ve created, follow, or have been
added to (and how many other people follow each of your lists); and how
many direct messages you’ve received.

(Twitter’s off-again-on-again new Retweet feature attempts to add
data on how many times you’ve retreated other people’s tweets and who
has retweeted yours, but at the moment I don’t find it very useful: it
will only show (some of) the actions made via the website’s Retweet
button, and doesn’t seem to be very accurate at that.)

We’ve talked here from time to time about tools like SociafyQ.com,
which tracks all your social networks and presents your basic
followers/following type of data in a convenient graph format — giving
a useful quick overview of growth trends over time — and about how to use shortened URLs to track clicks on your tweeted links, helping you to gauge what topics are of greatest interest to your Twitter audience.

There’s certainly no shortage of third-party Twitter analytics tools
out there, and most of them are free or at least offer a free version.
Here are some lists of Twitter tools you may want to explore:

Great… now, what do all those numbers mean?

The most detailed measurements are of limited use to us, in any practical way, without the next two steps in the process — Analysis and Interpretation, and Action. Sounds a bit scary, doesn’t it? Like you’d need to put a half-dozen statisticians on the job…

Most twitter analytics tools just do data puking…. You must pause and think: So what is this saying? What action can I take?

Now, that's concrete. Two simple questions that give focus to this whole business of measuring social media — and, most importantly, help to distinguish between truly useful metrics and, well, measurement for the sake of measurement. That's something we can work with!

In a must-read blog post called Social Media Analytics: Twitter: Quantitative & Qualitative Metrics,
Kaushik describes in detail his take on four new Twitter analytics
tools that, he believes, show promise for delivering better, more
useful data — numbers that give information you can actually use in
creating and refining your social media strategy:

Over the next few days, we’ll look at each of these tools from the perspective of nonprofit organizations, with the
focus firmly on Avinash Kaushik’s key questions — “What is this saying? What
action can I take?”

Let’s see if we can figure out together how these metrics can help your
organization to use Twitter (and, by extention, other social media platforms) more effectively, whether your primary
goal is awareness and public education, outreach and community
building, or perhaps even fundraising.

Joanne Fritz said:

Analytics...the word makes me shudder! I'm missing that part of the brain, but I'm going to follow you on this Rebecca and hope some of it sinks in. Thanks!

Wednesday, 09 December 2009 at 11:19 AM

Laura Norvig said:

There are so many tools out there - thanks for breaking this down for us, Rebecca - I can't wait to learn more about these four tools. Right now I'm pretty much just using Bitly and also tracking follower growth over time.

Wednesday, 09 December 2009 at 8:17 PM

John Haydon said:

Rebecca,

To me, stats tools fall into three categories based on their purpose:

Traffic / clicks - Bit.Ly, Google Analytics

Measuring one's effectiveness with Twitter - Tweetstats

Measuring one's network - Mr. Tweet, Klout, Twitter-friends

There are hundreds of tools out there for analysis. I just try and use two or three for each category.

John

Thursday, 10 December 2009 at 8:26 AM

Rebecca said:

Oh, c'mon, Joanne - it'll be fun!

Laura, you're so right about the plethora of Twitter measuring tools out there. It's hard to know what to choose and what to look at, never mind what to do about what you're seeing.

John, your breakdown is a useful way of batching the tools - but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how a nonprofit can best measure "effectiveness": what stats to look at there, and how to interpret them...

What's behind this foray into Twitter metrics?

Well, I have a suspicion - and this is based on some of the small nonprofits I belong to; your situation may well be very different - that many of us are settling for seeing an upward trend in the various numbers associated with Twitter use. Upward trends are terrific, but maybe we can find a way to extract more specific insights?

I'm really intrigued by Avinash Kaushik's comment to the effect that new media / social media calls for new ways of looking at metrics:

"Twitter is amongst new media channels that are challenging how we communicate, with whom we communicate and perhaps most fundamentally how we (Marketers) influence people.

"Sadly execution and analysis of these new social media channels has been hobbled by old world thinking. When it comes to marketing because of the old world thinking from the worlds of Television and Magazines, and when it comes to measurement because of the world of traditional web analytics.

"These new channels, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Tumblr and, yes, even blogs, are very distinct customer / participant experiences. Stale marketing or measurement thinking applied to them results in terribly sub optimal results for all involved."

Pushing the envelope, as it were... ;)

Thursday, 10 December 2009 at 9:10 AM

Beth Kanter said:

Rebecca: Thanks for the ping. Kismet! I have a post about this in draft, but am having lunch next week Avanish. I don't bother with all the puking data tools - they're pretty useless and a distraction. I evaluate my strategy against metrics of two tools:

Tweetmeme and twitanalyzer (google analytics plugin)

How many people are clicking on the links to my content I share?

What is the traffic referral to my site?

What is the conversation referral to my site/content?

Are people finding my tweets compelling enough to share with their networks?

How does all this move the needled to my ultimate outcomes/objectives?

Thursday, 10 December 2009 at 7:10 PM

Wild Apricot Blog said:

Twitter StreamGraphs is a Java-based visualization tool that gives you a colorful overview of the last 1000 tweets that come up in a search for any keyword, username, or list on Twitter. Pretty, yes, but is it truly useful for nonprofit organizations

Monday, 14 December 2009 at 4:22 PM

Wild Apricot Blog said:

Among the new Twitter analytics tools, TweetPsych stands out for its very different perspective — it analyses the language of your tweets to create a "psychological profile" and to suggest other Twitter users who "think like you."

Tuesday, 15 December 2009 at 5:48 AM

Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com said:

Thanks for posting this! I was just thinking about re-assessing how effective my Twitter use is toward reaching my goals!

Rebecca said:

Marc, I suspect you're not alone in putting a Twitter strategy reassessment on the New Year's "to do" list! ;-)

Thursday, 17 December 2009 at 8:51 AM

John Haydon said:

Rebecca - A nonprofit can best measure "effectiveness" by looking at engagement, mainly in the form of replies and retweets. You've covered all the tools, but it's good for non-profits to ask "Is anyone listening and interested in what we're talking about?

Wednesday, 23 December 2009 at 7:52 AM

Rebecca said:

John, thanks. I totally agree: Engagement is a nonprofit's best gauge of effectiveness in social media (along with measuring the resultant actions as best we can: tracking clicks via a URL shortener like bit.ly, for example, and noting the Twitter referrals in website analytics). In fact, the variety of metrics for measuring engagement are the main reason why I tend to favour Klout, personally, out of the four tools reviewed in this series.

Wednesday, 23 December 2009 at 8:03 AM

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